Ali Alfoneh is a former resident fellow at AEI and a doctoral
candidate at the department of political science at the University of
Copenhagen. His research areas include civil-military relations in the
Middle East, with a special focus on Iran and the role of the Islamic
Revolutionary Guards Corps in the politics of the Islamic Republic.
Previously, Alfoneh was a research fellow at the Institute for Strategy
at the Royal Danish Defence College and taught political economy at the
Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Southern Denmark.

Karim Sadjadpour is a senior
associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He joined
Carnegie after four years as the chief Iran analyst at the International
Crisis Group based in Washington, DC, and Tehran, where he conducted
dozens of interviews with senior Iranian officials and hundreds more
with Iranian intellectuals, clerics, dissidents, paramilitaries,
businessmen, students, activists, and youth, among others. He is a
regular contributor to BBC TV and Radio, CNN, National Public Radio, PBS
NewsHour, and Al-Jazeera. He has also appeared on the Today Show,
Charlie Rose, Fox News Sunday, and the Colbert Report, among others. He
contributes regularly to publications such as The Economist, The
Washington Post, The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune,
and Foreign Policy. Frequently called upon to brief US, EU, and Asian
officials about Middle Eastern affairs, he regularly testifies before
Congress; has lectured at Harvard University, Princeton University, and
Stanford University; and has been the recipient of numerous academic
awards, including a Fulbright scholarship.